Zelda Series Producer Wants Breath of the Wild’s Freedom in Future Games

Eiji Aonuma says his eyes “have been opened to how important” that freedom is.

Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild has been the subject of much critical praise and commercial success since launching for the Switch. The open world title completely revamped the standard exploration of Hyrule with an unprecedented level of freedom. As the game’s development winds down (the last DLC Champions’ Ballad was released in December) and the Game of the Year awards pour in, Zelda series producer Eiji Aonuma discusses what he’d like to see in the next title.

Apparently the game is already in production but there’s very little we know about it. While speaking to IGN, Aonuma did say he wanted to preserve the level of freedom that made Breath of the Wild such a success thanks to “how important that is.”

“You know, I can’t speak to what other people, other companies will do in their own games, but I think for me, especially just in terms of the Zelda series, the incredible freedom that this game offers you and how well that’s been received…to me, it means that freedom, that level of freedom is something that needs to be maintained in Zelda games going forward. My eyes have been opened to how important that is,” says Aonuma.

This doesn’t necessarily mean a huge open world like Breath of the Wild though. Aonuma said that, “For example, if there was like, ‘you can’t do this because you don’t have the right tools’ or ‘you don’t meet the certain requirements,’ players are going to not want to do that anymore. So we wanted to very much incorporate that. Going forward, I think we would definitely consider that way of thinking when we create something in the future.”

A good example would be The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds which allowed players to tackle the game’s dungeons in any order they saw fit. Perhaps we’ll see something like that in future Zelda games. What are your thoughts on the matter? Let us know below.